Recruitment Drive: Family Matters
by bissek
Summary: Based on the series by Afalstein. Good evening, Mr. Collier. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to convince SHIELD to stop recruiting agents from the IMF.
1. Chapter 1

Family Matters

Agent Triplett drove down the street. The safe house was only a couple blocks away. Once he was there, he could grab a few things stored there that they weren't well stocked with at the Toybox and drive away. A simple mission. It shouldn't take him more than ten minutes once he got there, so long as whoever was tracking down SHIELD's safe houses and looting them hadn't gotten there first. Unfortunately, when he arrived, it was clear that someone had already gotten there. A large van was parked outside the safe house and two men were tampering with the lock.

"That should do it, Ethan." The dark skinned man said to his partner.

"Good," The other man said with a satisfied smile on his face. "Now let's get to it. SHIELD's taken enough from us over the years. It's time that we got something back."

Triplett decided that the mission was a bust. Grabbing a camera, he snapped a picture of the two men and then drove away. Hopefully the picture would help SHIELD figure out who was raiding their supply caches.

* * *

"Got it," Skye reported as her computer declared a match. "The man on the right in this picture is Ethan Hunt, one of the top operations men in the Impossible Missions Force."

"The IMF?" Coulson asked. "What do they have against SHIELD? If what Triplett reported was true, there's some sort of institutional grudge in play here. In any case, better send a message to Reese warning him about the raids. He might want to move the supplies in the safe house we gave him to some other location."

"Will do, AC. Hold on, Northern Lights is sending us a number." Skye looked up the Social Security Number. "Barney Collier. Former owner of Collier Electronics, then an engineer assigned to field work for the IMF, now retired. The man's old enough to be my grandfather. What does the Machine think we can do with him? Does it think he can replace Fitz?" There was a sober pause. "Does it think we're going to _need_ to replace Fitz?"

Before they could contemplate that possibility for too long, Coulson's phone rang.

"Hello, Phil," Root said on the other end of the line, "I was told to let you know that the person she's brought to your attention has the answers to some questions that you had."

The two agents stared at the phone as Root hung up.

"That sort of thing is going to take a while to get used to." Coulson noted.

* * *

Barney Collier disengaged the complex electronic lock he had designed and installed on his rooms at the retirement home. It was a long way from his glory days, when he had built the world's first chess computer capable of matching a grandmaster, outwitted dozens of despots, spies and criminals and become the middleweight boxing champion of the world (A title he arguably still had more than forty-five years later - since only a handful of people knew who had really been in the ring that night, nobody had ever challenged him for it), but an old man had to find his amusements somewhere.

He was surprised to find that his home wasn't empty. A man was standing in the far corner of the room.

"Good evening, Mr. Collier." The man said.

Barney smiled at the long familiar phrasing "I think I'm a little old for missions nowadays. How did you get in here, anyway? I designed that lock myself."

"And it was a good one, too. It took my hacker nearly an hour to bypass it. Finding a place she could work on it without drawing attention to herself was quite a challenge." Barney turned and noticed a young woman working on a laptop, which he noted was not connected to his own computer in any way. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Phil Coulson, of SHIELD, and this is Agent Skye."

"SHIELD." Barney's eyes narrowed. "What would the world's most infamous secret agency want with an old man who's been out of the game for twenty years?"

"We had our bad eggs, just like everyone else. Didn't you once work directly for a traitor?" The girl asked.

"_Don't talk that way about Jim!_" Barney snapped.

"But he did try to sell out hundreds of agents throughout the world for money." Coulson pointed out. "I've been betrayed by friends in this business, too."

Barney forced himself to calm down. "So what do you want with me?"

"I'm sure you've noticed that ever since HYDRA's involvement in Project Insight was exposed, every government that used to back SHIELD has since disavowed us and are trying to annex all of our resources that they can get their hands on. One agency is definitely standing out in the fervor in which they are doing so: the IMF. It's clear that this is personal for them, not just for the agents involved, but the agency a whole.

"I came to ask you one question: Why does the IMF hate SHIELD so much? Given how limited our resources are at the moment, we can't afford to waste any of them dealing with a vendetta from another organization while we're trying to deal with HYDRA."

Barney laughed. "You mean to tell me that after everything SHIELD has done to us over the past fifty years you honestly don't know?"

"I've been searching our archives for weeks, and I haven't been able to find any evidence that SHIELD and the IMF have ever worked together." The hacker pointed out.

"That's because SHIELD never worked with anyone, they just threw their weight around and forced everyone else to go along with it." Barney closed his eyes as he recalled his first encounter with SHIELD. "When I was first recruited into the IMF, I was assigned to the team of a man named Dan Briggs. The five of us - Me, Dan, Rollin Hand, Cinnamon Carter, and Willy Armitage - were sent to handle situations all over the world. Extracting defectors, stopping biowarfare attacks, shutting down organized crime, just about any kind of crisis you can imagine. We saved the world more times in one year than James Bond did in his best decade of movies. We even stopped a few attempts to revive the Nazis." From the look Coulson's face, he'd been getting cracks of that nature all too often recently.

"Then, after about a year, Dan vanished from the IMF and was replaced by Jim Phelps. No explanation was given for what happened to Dan. Then two years later Rollin was pulled from the team and was replaced with Paris. After that, pretty much every year had the team losing a member that we'd have to replace. Willy and I were the only members of the original team who were still around eight years later.

"It took a while, but I eventually found out what happened to all my teammates. SHIELD decided they could use them, and strong-armed our superiors into transferring them. We were hardly the only team you were poaching from, but we were the one that got hit the most often. Sometimes I think that the only reason I never got grabbed was because back then you had Howard Stark on call - there was no reason to annex the world's second best engineer when you already had the best. You _did _try to grab my son in the early nineties, but Grant flat out told them that if he wasn't left alone he'd resign from the IMF and then raise a huge stink in the press about SHIELD trying to coerce private citizens into working for them."

"I remember a Dan Briggs. He was an instructor back when I was a trainee at the Operations Academy." Coulson noted. "So the start of the dispute was SHIELD habitually hiring your best people away from you?"

"You weren't just taking people away! We were more than teams, we were _family_. Even if there wasn't an official mission, if one of us needed help, everyone else would come, no questions asked. We once traveled to South America to run an off-the-books mission to help a friend of Jim's that the rest of us had never met just because he asked us to. When Cinnamon was captured during a mission, we all knew that our superiors would disavow her and order us to leave her behind, but we worked out a way to get her back before they had the opportunity to do so. SHIELD wasn't just forcing us to continually rebuild our teams if we wanted to get anything done, it was shattering our families over and over again, forcing us to pick up the pieces and try to recover before it happened to us again.

"Sometimes I wonder: If Rollin and Cinnamon hadn't been taken away, along with their replacements, could we have stopped the downward spiral that caused Jim to go rogue? Maybe he felt that he had no reason to be loyal to people who couldn't even protect his team from their so-called allies.

"Tell me, have you ever had a team be that close, Agent Coulson?"

The two SHIELD agents exchanged a glance. "We were trying on our last team," Coulson admitted. "Then one of us turned out to be HYDRA. We're still picking up the pieces.

"Thank you for your time, Mr. Collier. I will be adding the process of how we requisition aid from other agencies to the list of thing we're going to overhaul as we rebuild."

"And you think you can get your superiors to listen?"

Coulson smiled slightly. "Yes."

Skye looked up from her laptop. "I just looked into the names you mentioned. Agent Briggs is dead - he was visiting the Academy to give a guest lecture when HYDRA attacked, and was killed while executing a plan he came up with to get the trainees clear. Nearly three-quarters of the students made it out because of him. Agents Hand and Carter are retired.

"I've sent the location of Briggs' grave and the contact information for your other colleagues to your computer. I can't give you back the time you lost, sir, but I can give you an opportunity to see your family one last time. It's a good thing that your friend had such an unusual first name - there have been _lots _of Agent Carters in SHIELD, dating all the way back to the SSR in World War Two, but only one Cinnamon."

If true, it was a simple gesture of good faith, but it touched Barney nonetheless. "Thank you, miss."

Coulson added one more item. "If your friend Rollin is related to the late Agent Victoria Hand, please let him know that her killer is in custody, and won't be going anywhere for quite some time."

Rollin had never mentioned a relative named Victoria to Barney, but since it had been more than forty years since they'd last spoken, it was possible that she simply hadn't existed at the time. "I'll do that, Agent Coulson."

After the two had left, Barney powered up his computer, and found an email containing the information he was promised. After spending a couple days verifying the information, he called up an old friend.

"Willy? It's Barney. I just got some news about Dan, Rollin and Cinnamon. Are you up to attending a family reunion?"

* * *

A month after Agent Coulson met with Barney Collier, a package was left on the grave of Daniel Briggs, former agent of SHIELD and the IMF. Suspecting that it was a dead drop, Colonel Talbot of the US Air Force ordered the package seized the moment he learned of it. After the package was carefully scanned to ensure it could be opened safely, it was found to contain an envelope and an old tape recorder. As the forensics team opened the envelope to find a picture of three men and a woman, all of whom were easily in their seventies or eighties, the tape was played and copied.

"Good morning, Mr. Briggs," A man's voice said. "The people you are looking at are your old teammates, reunited one last time to say farewell to a friend and colleague."

"Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to rest in peace," A second man joined in, "Others will take on the duties you so ably performed in life."

"Though your country has disavowed you, know that we never will." A woman added.

"This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." A fourth voice said. "Good-bye, Dan."

Before anyone could stop the tape, it started to smoke. Within seconds, it was nothing but ash.

Talbot's men wasted over a hundred man hours looking into the copy of the tape and the photograph, convinced that there had to be something more to them than a rather unusual way of paying one's respect to a fallen comrade. They never found anything.

* * *

A/N: The idea for this came while working on my other Recruitment Drive fic. SHIELD was at the top of the intelligence community and knew it, so they probably did run roughshod over the others at time, which would generate resentment. This story also explains why virtually every season of Mission: Impossible has a major character be replaced with no in-universe explanation for this.

I was halfway through this before I remembered that SHIELD really does have agents with the last names of Hand and Carter, though their methods of operation have nothing in common with how the MI Hand and Carter worked.


	2. Chapter 2

"We just got a message from Gideon," Koenig said to Coulson. "Apparently Ward is talking. Well, talking might be stretching it. Croaking semi-intelligibly might be more accurate."

"Has he gotten anything out of him?"

"Unfortunately, no. Ward is now capable of communicating somewhat, but he has yet to say anything of importance. Breaking him is likely to take some time."

"A pity. We could use the information he has on HYDRA's facilities. Unfortunately, all our agents with interrogation skills are currently busy elsewhere at the moment and can't be spared."

There was a pair of beeps on Koenig's tablet. Koenig looked down.

"Let's see. One message is from Agent Root. It simply says 'Ask him.' The other is a nine digit number." The two men exchanged looks.

"As useful as the Machine can be, that doesn't make it any less disturbing when it does things like that. Who's the number?"

"Let's see... The number belongs to Rollin Hand, a former actor and stage magician who joined the IMF and was later recruited into SHIELD, now retired. Master of disguise, expert in sleight of hand, dozens of high profile interrogations completed... and father of the late Agent Victoria Hand."

Coulson smiled. "Why don't we ask him if he's interested in a little payback on her killer?"

* * *

Rollin Hand, the Man of a Thousand Faces, sighed as he flipped through the old photo album. This was all that he had left of his daughter now. When the news about HYDRA broke out, he had worried about her fate, as any father whose only child was in the middle of a war zone would. He certainly didn't expect that the first news he would get of her fate would be a secondhand message that her killer had been caught. He still didn't know who had killed her, the circumstances around her death, or where she was buried.

That discovery had put a serious damper on the pleasure of being reunited with his old teammates one last time, even more than the harassment he and all the others received from the Air Force after they left their little tribute on Dan's grave. In fact, Talbott's efforts at interrogation had been more amusing than terrifying. Rollin and the others had invented more ways of breaking a man than the self-righteous Colonel had ever dreamed of - on one occasion they had even tricked a man into interrogating _himself_ to the breaking point. All Talbott's petty bullying had accomplished was to give Rollin something to think about other than his recent loss.

There was a knock at the door. Rollin ignored it. The knocking continued. Rollin rose with a groan and made his way to the door. On the other side was an Asian woman.

"Rollin Hand?" She asked. "My name's Melinda May. May I come in?"

"No." Rollin started to close the door.

May's hand shot out and grabbed the door frame. "It's about your daughter."

Rollin let the woman in. "So," He asked, as they sat down, "What do you have to do with my daughter?"

"I used to work with her." Which meant she was SHIELD, of course, but right now Rollin couldn't really care. "I brought in the man responsible for her death. I thought you should hear what had happened from someone who had been there, at least, someone as close as possible to being there."

Rollin nodded. "Go on."

"I don't have to tell you that your daughter was loyal." She began. "The day HYDRA came out, she secured our main base from the HYDRA agents who had been inserted into the security forces. In the process, she captured a high-level HYDRA agent, John Garrett, also known as the Clairvoyant."

"The old phony psychic routine?" Rollin asked.

"You've seen that?"

"It's not exactly a new trick. Have someone claim they can predict the future, while having a couple guys sneaking around ensuring the predictions come true until the mark believes it. Operations men have been using that scheme for at least fifty years now."

"It was a... bit more involved than that." May winced. "He'd used his SHIELD access to convince his criminal underlings he was omniscient. A huge thorn in our side. Your daughter decided to transport Garrett to the Fridge herself. One of Garrett's former protégés, an Agent Grant Ward, offered to be part of the guard detail on the flight. We all thought that he was disgusted with his mentor's treachery and wanted to personally see the man punished." May looked away. "It wasn't until much later that we realized that Garrett had recruited Ward into HYDRA long before arranging for him to attend the SHIELD Academy. While we don't know exactly what happened on that flight, only two people who were on it were ever seen again - John Garrett, and Grant Ward."

Rollin closed his eyes. For a moment there was silence. "You said you captured them." He said at last, eyes still closed. "Why haven't you questioned them?"

"Garrett is dead now. Quite dead. They had to clean up what was left of him with a mop and bury him in a bucket. As for Ward, I'm afraid I had to crush his larynx while subduing him." May's mouth twitched in what Rollin assumed was the woman's version of a smile. "He only regained the ability to speak a few days ago. So far, the interrogator the US Government has working him over at the prison he's currently held at hasn't been able to get anything out of him."

Rollin narrowed his eyes. "Could you get me a copy of his file? I've broken quite a few men over the years. I suppose I could come out of retirement to break one more."

May looked thoughtful. "It might be possible. I'll have to ask my superiors." She rose. "I'll contact you in a few days when I have the answer."

Two days later, May was back, bearing with her a pair of profiles. "This is Ward's original profile, from when we considered him a loyal agent." She said. "It's accurate, but obviously it's incomplete. The other file is what we've managed to glean since then." May frowned. "It's... not much to go on."

"I've worked with less." Rollin looked up with an almost hungry smile after flipping through both files. "I can do this, but I'm going to need a few things. First, I'll need the cooperation of the warden of the prison Ward is being held in and his official interrogator, unless you're willing to break him out so we can do this totally in-house."

"That won't be necessary." May shook her head. "We have an inside man."

"Your doctor Gideon?" Rollin asked. May inclined her head. "Don't have him mention my history with SHIELD - my old IMF credentials will probably get us farther at this point. Second, I'll need front and profile photographs of Andrew Ward and Leo Fitz, along with recordings of the voices of Susan Ward, Timothy Ward, and Leo Fitz."

"What sorts of recordings?" May looked faintly confused.

"It doesn't matter what they're saying, so long as there's enough data to get a solid voiceprint." Rollin waved his hand dismissively. "Finally, I'll need the assistance of your Agent Skye."

* * *

"Grant, help!" A young boy called out.

"Grant, help!" The boy called out, with a hint of a Scottish accent.

"Grant, help!" The accent became stronger.

Again and again the voice called out, with each time the accent getting stronger until it became the voice of Leo Fitz.

Rollin stopped playing the sound files. "Excellent. And you have these for all the various lines I scripted?"

Skye nodded. "Both the ones for the age-regressed voice of Ward's little brother and Fitz, and the ones for the age-regressed voice of Ward's sister and myself."

"The hidden speakers?"

"They're going to be planted in Ward's cell the next time he's taken out for interrogation." Doctor Gideon reported.

"Good. How about the well?"

"It's being dug, but it won't be ready for another week or so."

"That's alright. I won't be needing it until it's time for the endgame, which is going to take at least three weeks to set up."

"I still don't get how this is going to break Ward." Skye protested.

"Young lady," Rollin lectured, "Over the decades, people in the spy business have gotten more and more enamored with toys and have forgotten that the lynchpin of all intelligence work is the _people_. If you know how people think, you can predict how they'll react to a given situation. And if you then control their understanding of what's going on, you can trick them into doing whatever you want of their own free will, and they won't even realize they're being manipulated until it's too late. The technology is a tool to guide your target into thinking what you want them to think. It is a part of the solution, not the entire solution. The ultimate example of this is the long game HYDRA played on SHIELD. They pulled their manipulations off on entire countries on a generational scale, and they almost got away with it - if Fury had been a little easier to kill, it might have worked. But they became too enamored of how powerful Insight would make them when they got it running that they underestimated Fury's paranoia, which kept him alive long enough to warn Captain America and provide him with the means to shut Insight down. Because they failed to control one man at the wrong moment, their ultimate weapon was ultimately useless.

"That might be the real reason that SHIELD recruited from the IMF so often. We _always_ worked on that principle, so HYDRA must have wanted to keep a close eye on as many of the people who understood their playbook as possible.

"In this case, we're going to remind Ward of his childhood. Both versions of his profile agree that this is what shaped the man he is today, even though they disagree as to how. We'll get him thinking about what made him who he is today, and then we'll shove a reminder of where life has brought him down his throat."

* * *

Grant Ward sat in his cell. He didn't know how long he'd been there. He never got to look out a window to see if it was day or night, the rooms he was allowed to see were always illuminated, the guards he saw were always the same, and the meals were always identical - a murky broth that occasionally varied slightly in consistency, since his throat injury meant that he wasn't allowed solid food. This was deliberate on the part of his jailors. Depriving prisoners of a sense of the passage of time was a traditional part of interrogation techniques.

There was a good chance that his last meal only been served an hour or so ago, but he started to eat anyway - since the guards fed him at random times, his next meal could be twenty hours from now. Picking up the flimsy plastic spoon (Chosen for its utter uselessness as a weapon in the event that he wanted to try a breakout), he slowly slurped up the broth. After finishing his meal, he laid down on the cot and tried to sleep. It was entirely possible that the guards would wake him up in half an hour just to mess with him, but he needed to at least try to rest.

* * *

After Ward fell asleep, the door to his cell opened. Rollin entered with a makeup kit, made a few subtle changes to the prisoner's face, and then left.

"Why didn't you just completely make over his face in one go?" Captain Anderson, the interrogator assigned to Ward, asked him after he left.

"The alterations I'm making are hardly weightless. If I do it all at once, he might realize that his head is several ounces heavier than it was when he went to sleep. I need to do it gradually so that he doesn't figure out that I'm constructing a mask on top of his real face."

"And this will break him?"

"Eventually. Now, next time you interrogate him, make sure to remind him of his family. Don't make them a major point in the interrogation, just casually bring them up and move on to the next topic. And continue to do that every second or third session after that."

"Are you sure this is going to do anything?"

"Captain, do you how many thousands of people who died when the Russians introduced botulism into every major reservoir in California back in the mid-sixties? Or how many millions died from a submarine launched nuclear missile strike two and a half years later?"

"None, they never happened."

"Exactly. But if you check with the Navy and Homeland Security, you will find records proving that they were attempted. This is not my first interrogation, Captain. I know what I'm doing. Just go along with the plan, and make sure he doesn't see anything reflective until it's time for the endgame."

* * *

Grant was thrown back into his cell after another fruitless interrogation. Knowing the routine, he sat down on the cot, waiting for the guards to decide it was time to either feed him again or interrogate him again.

Time passes slowly when have absolutely nothing to do and no way to mark its passage. It could have been ten minutes from when he was returned to his cell, or three hours, he couldn't tell. But after a while, he thought he could hear a faint splashing sound. It gradually grew clearer, until he thought he could hear a voice as well.

"lp!" The voice said.

"nt, help!" It came a little clearer.

"Grant, help!" It came a third time, just loud enough for him to make out the words, and then it faded out.

"Timothy?" Grant croaked. Then he shook his head. It must have been his imagination.

* * *

Watching from a security camera, Rollin looked at Ward's reaction and nodded with satisfaction. Then he carefully programmed an alarm clock to alert him in two hours and thirteen minutes and pulled out a book. When the alarm went off, it would be time to play the first of the sister clips.

* * *

Weeks passed. Rollin played the recordings of Grant's siblings in distress at random times, gradually transitioning to the versions that used the voices of his former comrades in the process. Every few days, the guards would drug the broth sufficiently to ensure that Ward would sleep soundly, at which point Rollin would add another layer to the disguise he was slowly adding to his face.

Rollin and Anderson watched as Ward became twitchier and twitchier about the voices he heard in his cell. Then one day, Rollin turned to his colleague. "It's time. The penultimate stage is to be done tonight. Give Ward this drug in his soup an hour after sunset. Once he's asleep, have the guards change his clothing and take him to the clearing I've had prepared.

"Meet me here at sunset so I can prepare you and an extra for your parts. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to mix some stage blood and prepare your makeup. Don't worry about your lines, I had them pre-recorded almost a month ago."

* * *

Ward opened his eyes blearily. As his vision focused, he saw that he wasn't in his cell. He was in a clearing. How had he gotten here?

"Grant..." A girl's voice called out in pain. His sister's voice.

"Grant... Why did you do that...?"

A dream. It must be a dream of how his brother Andrew had abused his siblings, and had forced him to participate.

"Why did you let him do that...?"

The voice was coming from nearby. Ward turned sluggishly and saw a body lying on the ground. As he moved closer to it, the body rolled over, and he could see its face. It wasn't Susan's.

"Why, Grant?" Skye asked. "Why did you let him do this to me?"

Ward stared with horror at the body of his former trainee, covered in blood the way she was the day that Quinn nearly killed her. As her weak voice continued to demand an explanation, he stepped back, trying to avoid the accusations. Then he heard the splashing, and the voice of his brother Timothy begging for rescue the way he had the day that Andrew had dropped him down the well. As he turned around, he saw that there was a well, and that the sounds were coming from there.

Shakily, Ward looked down into the well, and as he did, the voice changed from that of an American boy to a Scottish man. The person in the well wasn't Timothy Ward. It was Leo Fitz.

"Ward! Aren't we friends? Why did you do this?" Fitz plead as he struggled to stay above the water.

"Please Ward, help! _Help!_" Fitz's pleas faded out as his stamina gave out and he slid under.

Ward stared at the bubbles slowly forming on the dark surface of the water in the well. Then there was a sharp pain in his shoulder and he blacked out.

* * *

After Ward dropped from the tranquilizer dart in his shoulder, Skye got up off the ground and dusted herself off.

"Is that it?" She asked.

Rollin approached from a distance, accompanied by one of the prison guards. "Almost." Walking to the well, he called out "You can get out now, Captain."

Fitz's head popped out of the water, the air hose of a diving tank clenched between his teeth. After climbing out using a hidden ladder built into the side of the well, he reached around to the back of his neck and pulled off his mask, revealing the face of Captain Anderson.

"What's the next step?" He inquired.

"Now I put the finishing touches on his new face, we change him back into his old uniform, and we return him to his cell. When he wakes up, he'll think what he just saw was a dream. Make sure tomorrow's soup is nice and clear, so he can see his face in it." Rollin instructed.

"This should be interesting."

* * *

Ward slowly opened his eyes. What was that? Some sort of nightmare about his siblings and his former teammates? Looking around, he could see that he was still in his cell, as if nothing had ever happened. Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, Ward prepared himself for another day of broth and questioning.

Eventually, the door to his cell opened. The usual guards entered. One of them covered him while the other presented him with the usual tray containing a bowl of broth and a cheap spoon. Then they collected the tray from the previous meal and left. Ward picked up the spoon and looked down at the tray. The guards had slipped up. Today's broth was clearly a different recipe from the usual. It was clear enough that he could see his reflection in it.

Wait.

It wasn't _his _reflection.

Staring back at Grant was the face of his brother Andrew.

* * *

Captain Anderson listened to the moan of despair coming from the cell and knew that his subject had cracked.

"And that's it?" He asked.

"That's it." Rollin concurred. "He's just drawn the connection between what his brother did to him and his siblings and what he's done to others as an agent of HYDRA. Give him a little while to stew, then bring him in for questioning. Make to bring up how much harm his actions have done. Once you've gotten him talking for a while, you can drug him again and give him his old face back."

"Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Hand." Anderson, offering his hand.

"My pleasure, Captain." Rollin said, taking it. "Could you do one small favor for me in return?"

"What did you have in mind?" Anderson's voice was guarded, wondering what the price for breaking the HYDRA agent would be now that it was due.

"The day after HYDRA came out in the open, Agent Ward hijacked a prisoner transport delivering his immediate superior in HYDRA to a SHIELD holding facility. I want to know what happened to the guards and crew on that transport."

"The guards and crew? Why do you want to know about them?" That was an odd request. The other enemy agent would be a far more important person to track.

"My daughter was in command of that mission." Rollin said flatly. "I know it's probably too much to hope that she and the others are being held prisoner somewhere, but..."

"You have to know," Anderson said, now understanding why the old man had volunteered to break Ward. "Alright, Mr. Hand. One way or the other, I will see to it that your daughter comes home."

"Thank you, Captain." Rollin shook his hand again and left the prison.

* * *

Two weeks later, Rollin was sitting down for breakfast when the phone rang.

"Mr. Hand?" Captain Anderson's voice said.

"Yes?" Rollin answered.

"A few days ago a team sent to verify a statement given by Agent Ward found a group of bodies. The DNA results just came back - one of the bodies is your daughter, Victoria Hand. I'm sorry."

Rollin bowed his head. "Thank you for letting me know."

"Are there any specific funeral arrangements you have in mind? It's already been decided that the people that Ward murdered on that flight are entitled to a burial with full honors at Arlington, if that's what would you like."

"Can I think about that for a bit?"

"Alright. You can call me back at this number."

Rollin wrote down the number, thanked the Captain again, and hung up.

And so it ended. His daughter's body had been found, and she would be remembered as a fallen hero, rather than a criminal. Her killer was being milked for all the intelligence on his employers that the United States Government could squeeze out of him. His final mission, self-assigned as it was, was over.

Rollin paused. _Had_ his mission been self-assigned? Thinking back to the events of over a month before, he realized it hadn't been. SHIELD had _wanted_ him to break Ward, but if they'd just sent someone to ask him to do it, he would have responded angrily and demanded they leave. So instead May came as a sympathetic figure offering him some closure, and maneuvered him into _volunteering_ to break the man.

Rollin raised his coffee mug in salute. "Well, played, Agent May. Well played."

* * *

A/N: There are no canon names for Ward's brothers and sister at present, so I made some up.

This does not necessarily mean that Ward is going to be redeemed, just that he's now being used as a source of intelligence. Personally, I think that any attempt to plausibly redeem Ward would require a long story arc to get him to want redemption, followed by an even longer one to get the rest of the cast to honestly believe that he's trying to make amends. After all, Ward is very good at playing a role, and his former teammates _know _that he's very good at playing a role. They'd have to be complete idiots to look at a remorseful Ward and not think to themselves "How do I know he's not just playing another role?"


End file.
